0 A.D. is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. It's a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of twelve ancient civilizations, from Iberia to Mauryan India, each depicted at their peak of economic growth and military prowess. Developed using Pyrogenesis, a ground-breaking new game engine custom-built to suit this project, 0 A.D. will give players a rich and entertaining real-time gaming experience.

Wildfire Games, the international group of volunteers developing 0 A.D., are happy to present this week's 0 A.D. development report. If you want to find out more about the development of this open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy game or if you are interested in game development in general, it might be an interesting read.

If you want to be part of this project, we urge you to post your application in our forums. We are currently looking for Gameplay, AI, Sound and GraphicsProgrammers along with Animatorsand 3D & texture artists. You prefer to do something else than programming or drawing? Luckily for your portfolio we are also looking for a Sound Lead, Video Editors, a Documentation Manager and Scenario Designers. Still no luck? Head to our forums and join our active community!

Team news!

Congratulations to three valuable contributors who were recently asked to join the 0 A.D. team: wraitii, myconid and Deiz.Some of their work has already been shown in last report, and a lot more will follow in the coming reports!Feature Spotlight!

Eggbird has been putting the last touches on the Civic Centre for the Mauryan Indians. This new faction which will be added over the next few releases, and we expect them to be fully playable by Alpha XIII. In the following video you can see one of the props Eggbird has made for the Civic Centre. This column is known as a Pillar of Ashoka. These pillars were erected during the reign of the Mauryan king Ashoka (3rd century BC) and were inscribed with (legislative) edicts. Pillars have been found all over the Indian peninsula and beyond (one pillar was discovered in Kandahar, Afghanistan).

Art & Programming

Deizhas been firing a barrage of fixes towards us including rally points for trade and improved gate behaviour among others. One of his usability changes also allows people to hold the Tab key to display all the health bars of the units on the screen. A feature that will be more than useful while your soldiers are in battle.Gen.Kenobi finished the Hellenic Fortress and then started working on other Greek buildings. He also worked on rock formations and uploaded a video tutorial.Myconid has kept working -- relentlessly -- on modernizing 0 A.D.'s visual effects. It would take a whole page to describe all the features he is currently working on. We'll show you all this visual candy in a special report, somewhere in the near future.The groundwork for Myconid's visual galore was recently reviewed and added by programmers historic_brunoand quantumstate. 0 A.D.'s models can now store multiple UV coordinate sets, which make it possible to add advanced texturing techniques such as lightmaps, decal maps e.a.A second patch by Myconid: data-driven texture loading was also implemented this week. This allows actor files to have multiple texture files.Pureonhas been finetuning the animations for 'his' gates. For those who haven't seen these gates in action, check out the teaser video he made. He has also been cleaning up some of the redundant and missing XML references, together with Mythos_Ruler.After his work on the new GUI, Spahbod started working on implementing cheats! Rest assured that we won't stop pestering him until we can have a bigdaddy, pow and e=mc2 trooper! He has also finished working on a new random map: 'Northern Lights', taking you to the Arctic region.Zaggy1024 has finished the animations for elephants. He also added prop points to their backs (archer platform anyone?)

Audio

Our composer Omri Lahav, doesn't stop improving existing tracks and recording new material. Expect a lot of new material in the next alpha release!Recent addition to our ranks, Evan Bogunia, has been recording additional sounds. This week he has recorded sounds for horses.

Yeah, seriously :) We do intend to include an option to set them as enabled or disabled before the match starts though, so it will be up to the player/players whether to use them or not :) They are of course to a great degree for fun, but they can also be useful for testing when you for example want to test some of the unit training/fighting parts of the game, but don't want to test the economics part, then you can just give yourself a lot of resources.